Merkel visits the scene

Kate Connolly

Angela Merkel is visiting the scene of the lorry attack. She is flanked by Berlin’s mayor, Michael Müller, the interior minister Thomas De Maizière, and the foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. The chancellor lays flowers at the scene.

Merkel is looking at letters, notes, and candles left by mourners – one sign reads: “Why?” while another says: “The heart of Berlin has been hit.” All the politicians are dressed in black.Close by, a plastic sheet marks the place the lorry crashed into the market.

Q: When did the Polish owner of the lorry report to police that his vehicle was missing?Kandt says the first time they knew about the existence of the lorry was after the attack had taken place. He said the fact the owner had no GPS contact to the lorry was unusual, and therefore it was not to be expected that he would have necessarily contacted the police.

Questions are being asked as to why US authorities had apparently warned their own citizens to avoid Christmas markets in Germany, back in November, but German authorities did not issue such warnings.Another question being asked: why were no stone bollards erected at the market?Kandt, the Berlin police president, says even if we had put bollards up it would not have prevented the attack. He said there were “so many potential targets” – with 2,500 Christmas markets in Germany, 60 of them in Berlin.

Holger Münch, the head of the federal criminal police office, says there is a “question mark” over whether the attacker was an Islamists.

Frank said the authorities should know by this evening whether they arrested the right man. He said it was still not clear whether it was a terrorist attack. He said prosecutors were working on the assumption that it could have been a terrorist act based on the method of the attack. But he stressed that nothing was proven.